Saturday, February 05, 2011

Ashmolean Museum, Cypriot antiquities

In 1983, David Frankel published some of the Early and Middle Bronze Age Material in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. It fits the general outline of international public museums acquiring probably looted antiquities, including conflict antiquities.
The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology is part of the University of Oxford. Frankel published 266 of the roughly 1,400 artefacts in its Cypriot Bronze Age collection.

Numbers

247 of those 266 were of apparently '[u]nknown provenance' (Frankel, 1983: 18); yet 9 of the 247 artefacts of "unknown provenance" were "said to be from" sites in Greece; so since they may well have been found outside Cyprus, I have excluded them from my review (fn1).

(Thus, I counted 238 of the unprovenanced antiquities, and studied 257 of the published artefacts.)

There were 3 finds donated by archaeologist Hector Catling in 1970. Each catalogue entry was briefer than the last, but the fullest first entry, for a find '[p]resented by H. W. Catling' in the Report of the Visitors 1969-1970' (ibid.: 36), suggests they were chance finds donated to the museum.

So, there were 3 (1.17%) chance finds; but the other 254 (98.83%) of the artefacts were probably looted. Of those 254,

223 (87.80%) were probably looted before conflict, including

8 with no acquisition date or find-spot;

203 artefacts, either acquired before the beginning of the 1963-1974 intercommunal conflict, or from collections created before then;

2 artefacts which were '[p]resented' by the Cyprus Exploration Fund in 1888, without any other information (when #1278-#1281, which were from even earlier and themselves probably looted, had find-spots); and

1 which was '[p]resented' in 1948 by a private collector, who 'bought [#0131] from [the] Department of Antiquities' through 1930s British colonial governor and antiquities inspector, Rupert Forbes Gunnis (Frankel, 1983: 33; unlike #0149 and #0215, which were recorded under the same system but had publications showing their origins);

5 from Turkish Cypriot Galinoporni; and

4 from Greek Cypriot majority mixed Nicosia; while

31 (12.20%) were probably looted during the intercommunal conflict, including

24 with an acquisition date between 1964 and 1974, but without a find-spot; and

7 from Turkish Cypriot Magounda.

Findings

So, the sample of probably looted artefacts' find-spots is too small to be used on its own. (For the record, though, 55.56% of the antiquities probably looted before the conflict were probably looted by Turkish Cypriots, 44.44% by Greek Cypriots; and all of the conflict antiquities were Turkish Cypriot-looted.)

Still, there was enough evidence to work out how the museum got its artefacts and when. Most of its collection seems to have been looted, and most of it seems to have been acquired in peacetime; but some were conflict antiquities, acquired during - and it could be said through - the intercommunal conflict.

Footnotes

fn1: Equally, 1 of the 24 artefacts probably looted during the conflict had a '[s]uggested provenance' (ibid.: 23), a find-spot in Cyprus; so since it may well not have been found in the suggested village, I have not included its possible find-spot in my review.

1233-1239: 5 in 1968 and 2 in 1969 (Frankel, 1983: 114-115), ‘Material purchased (with the aid of the Bomford Trust) at Sotheby’s in 1968, and directly from the owners in 1969. Dr H. W. Catling was able to establish that the objects came from a cemetery near Magounda in the Paphos District’ (Frankel, 1983: 114)